Voica Armstrong L&S Arts & Humanities
The Slow Rebellion: Postmodern SF as Temporal Capitalist Critique
Political-economic conditions shape collective temporal experiences. Under neoliberal capitalism, we experience accelerated and fragmented time, with labor and leisure increasingly convergent. This is the lived temporality that postmodern science fiction authors inherit and, I argue, actively contest through formal narrative choices. For my project, I will close-read six select postmodern science fiction novels in relation to their socio-economic contexts, arguing that SF proposes alternative models of societal time. I seek to describe how and when science fiction’s various narrative forms become sites where the politics of time turn contestable and serve as critical responses to socially constructed versions of societal time conventions. Amid AI systems which enforce visions of speed and frictionless efficiency, understanding how SF disrupts temporal logics offers critical resources for the present.
Message To Sponsor
I am so grateful for your generous funding! I am fascinated by how we experience time, collectively and individually, and why. In my classes, I learned that the movement of capital, interactions with technologies, and other forces shape how societies think about time. As an English major, I am interested in how writers can build resistance to these logics, and how time could stretch or change to accommodate other visions. Through your help, I can begin to tackle these big questions. Thank you!